Surprisingly, I didn’t have any trouble putting down a medium burger and fries, and neither did anyone else at the table. No one said anything as I ordered a steak to-go. When I tried to pay, Archer waved away the money and said it was the least they owed me.
I finished my drink and stared at nothing, replaying over and over that moment when the beast leapt out of nowhere and landed paws-first on Archer. But he hadn’t been injured. It hadn’t even knocked the breath out of him.
Giselle fussed with Lars’s phone, then showed me a still of the dead wild man. “You’re sure this is the guy who attacked you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She said, “Huh,” and examined the photo closely. She showed it to Archer. “You know what he looks like.”
A shadow crossed his expression. “I know.”
My head fell back and I groaned. “Really? Being cryptic after everything that happened?”
Ryan picked up the tablet Archer gave me, and flipped it on to pull up another series of photos. He handed it back to me. “Look at the eyes, the teeth, the jaw, and the hairline. Identify the abnormalities.”
“I didn’t prepare for an anatomy test,” I said. But I studied the obviously dead man on the tablet. My stomach turned over and my burger threatened to make an appearance. Yellow, broken teeth. Bloodshot eyes with red around the iris. A hairline closer to the face than would typically be normal; the eyebrows almost joined it. Elongated lower jaw, misshapen closer to the joint as if too many teeth crowded in his mouth. Large ears, flared out at the top. “Okay?”
“Look at this again.” They handed back the phone.
Mental exhaustion encouraged me to proclaim I got it, understood everything, and believed them all the way to my bones. Then I could go home and sleep in peace. Until Dragomir showed up or Hopper wanted to play ‘how much stuff can I put in the tub’ at three in the morning.
But that damned curiosity took hold and I peered closer. Elongated jaw. Hairline halfway down his forehead and bushy eyebrows that met it. Flared ears. My heart beat faster. Same abnormalities. I looked up to find all of them watching me, even half-asleep Isidro.
I handed the phone back to Lars. “So they had a similar genetic mutation or metabolic syndrome. Any number of things can produce those symptoms.”
“That’s what happens after a person spends more than a month as a werewolf,” Archer said. “The transformation bends and breaks cartilage and bone after the virus alters the genetic makeup.”
I stilled. A virus. Like the virus that created vampires? It sounded similar on the surface: bitten, infected with a virus, waiting some time to transform, controlled by the moon. Could they be linked? The same virus? My eyes tracked back and forth across the table as I ran through and dismissed hypotheses. Had they collected blood samples from the one that attacked us? I could compare the red and white blood cells to Dragomir’s and isolate similar characteristics. The werewolves could notionally walk around in the day, since that one attacked us in the afternoon, but perhaps they required the shade of a thick canopy. Maybe something in that virus held the clue to protecting the vampire from sunlight.
“Thinking pretty hard over there, Ada,” Archer said. His eyes glinted in the flashing lights from another TV right behind us. He knew I’d started to believe, because the dimple reappeared. He just didn’t know why I believed. Nothing to do with his pictures or two dead guys with unibrows.
Dragomir.
I gathered up the tablet, takeaway container, and my bag. “I need to go. To think about… everything. I’ll… We can talk tomorrow. Like you said.”
My heart raced and I fumbled the box, almost dumping my steak on Lars. I hardly made it to my truck in one piece, cursing my cast the entire way, and drove home at ten miles an hour as my thoughts raced with possibilities.